They had attempted an emergency landing, but the burning Halifax had clipped the top of a copse of poplar and oak trees and crashed, killing all on board and flinging the bodies of two of the crew clear.

"I'm very pleased that we found them. We have cleared up a mystery," Mr Bechler told the Guardian yesterday. "They were missing in action for so many years."

Mr Bechler said he knew he was in the right spot when he discovered a skull fragment. The plane was hidden under half a metre of earth.

Further digging revealed several bones, English pennies, army boots made in Petersfield and a silk escape route map showing Germany, Holland and Belgium. The plane's fuel gauge and motor were also recovered.

The relatives, who for the entire postwar period had no idea what had happened to their loved ones, will attend a funeral service today for the men at St George's church in Berlin, followed by a ceremony at the British military cemetery.

Yesterday Gordon Cooper, 79, the brother of Norman Cooper, one of the missing crew, said he was relieved the mystery of what had happened to his brother had finally been solved.

"My mother never really gave up hope that Norman would come back. All we knew was that he had been shot down. There is great satisfaction that he has been recovered," he said.

He added: "My brother was a very witty and mischievous young man. I remember him annoying my mother so much that she threw a cup of tea at him. He was intelligent and got out of the way."

Asked how he felt when he received news that his brother's remains had been found, he replied: "Devastated. It brought it all back."

His brother had flown "20 plus missions" and was aware of the risks involved, he said.

Although Luftwaffe records had precisely recorded the site of the crash, the area ended up after the war in communist East Germany, which prohibited the excavation of all crashed wartime aircraft.

It was only after the end of the cold war and the fall of the Berlin wall, that German investigators were able to explore the site.

Immediately after the Halifax came down, locals buried two of the British crew in a nearby graveyard.

Yesterday Mr Bechler said the crew would have had no chance of baleing out from their burning aircraft, which set off on the raid together with 577 Lancasters, 215 other Halifaxes, and 18 Mosquitos.

German records actually identify who shot the Halifax down. It was Oberstleutnant or wing commander Karl-Heinz Seeler, a Messerschmitt pilot, who even toured the crash site the following day.

Seeler was himself shot down and killed in the last months of the war. But one of his friends and fellow pilots, will attend today's ceremony.